


Pas de Deux

by carolinecrane



Category: So You Think You Can Dance RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-13
Updated: 2010-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:09:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinecrane/pseuds/carolinecrane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's season seven, and Ivan's watching Travis' star rise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pas de Deux

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quettaser](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quettaser/gifts).



> Oh, I hope I did these two justice. I've loved them for years and then I saw your request and found myself inspired, and this happened.
> 
> With thanks to Liz for the beta.

Ivan’s in L.A. on the night of week two, but he’s not in the audience, so he doesn’t hear what happens until later. He’s doing a revue across town, and he’s on stage when Travis is getting his ass handed to him on national television. Dancing a routine Travis helped choreograph, which would be funny if he didn’t know how hard Travis is taking whatever Nigel said before Ivan even gets him on the phone.

The first he hears about it is a text from Allison, standing backstage and probably watching Travis’ face go blank and impassive while he listens to the judges trash his choreography. She doesn’t say much, just that they called it ‘contemporary’, like that’s a bad thing or something. Like that’s not Travis’ wheelhouse, Ivan thinks, rolling his eyes and hitting speed dial for the fifth time.

He expects Travis’ voicemail again, but this time the line actually connects and then he hears Travis’ voice, low like he’s trying not to be overheard. “Hey.”

“Nigel’s an idiot, man. Don’t let it get to you.”

Travis huffs out something like a laugh, but Ivan’s known him long enough to tell that, yeah, he’s letting it get to him. “Did you rope Allison into spying for you or did she come up with that on her own?”

“Whatever, she knows how much you miss me when I’m not there to hold your hand.”

Travis snorts on the other end of the line, and Ivan pictures him rolling his eyes. But the thing is, it’s kind of true. Not that Travis needs Ivan to hold his hand, but Allison knows Travis at least runs everything by him, and half the time Ivan helps with the choreography, so she knows he cares how it went over.

“Anyway, they were right. It wasn’t really a jazz routine. I just feel bad about letting Ashley down.”

“You didn’t let anybody down, Trav.”

Ivan pauses and runs a hand through his hair, pictures the miserable expression Travis is sporting right now, the one he first saw when they were on the show together and Travis ended up in the bottom. Like Ivan wasn’t in the bottom practically every other week all season, so he knew how it felt to kick your own ass for letting down your partner.

But the choreographers didn’t usually get that kind of shit from the judges, and Ivan wonders if Nigel feels okay with calling Travis out like that because he’s a former contestant. It’s bullshit, Ivan thinks, but he doesn’t say so.

“Just come home, man. I’ll meet you there.”

He expects an argument, for Travis to say that he has to hang out for the post-show stuff, shake hands with audience members and sign autographs and then go backstage to grovel to Nigel about how sorry he is for fucking up. But Travis doesn’t say any of that, and he doesn’t even insist on taking the time to tell Ashley he’s sorry and he hopes she gets through in spite of his routine.

Instead he just says, “Yeah, okay. How soon can you be there?”

“Half an hour,” Ivan says, and he figures if he gets lucky and doesn’t hit a ton of traffic, he might even make it in twenty minutes.

He knows better than to think he can stop Travis from brooding about the show for long, but he can distract him for a little while, maybe even long enough that he’ll get some sleep before he wakes up and starts brooding again. In the morning Travis will be right back at it, sure, and he’ll probably keep it up until Ivan yells at him to get over himself. But he’s got a week off from the show, and that means a whole week that Ivan gets to be in the studio with him, helping him out with the contemporary number for week four or working on their own stuff.

They don’t get all that much time together just to dance when Travis is working on the show, and Ivan’s planning to make the most of it. Starting with getting home and getting Travis in bed, where Ivan always has his undivided attention.

~

Later, when Travis is lying next to him with his head too heavy on Ivan’s shoulder and his body pumping out heat like a furnace, he brings it up again. Not that it surprises Ivan or anything, but if Travis is still thinking about it after Ivan sucked him off, clearly Ivan’s doing something wrong.

“You think Ashley’s going to get sent home because of me?”

Ivan turns his head so he can brush a kiss against Travis’ temple, fingers buried in messy blond hair to stroke along Travis’ scalp. “No, man. If anything, you won her a bunch of sympathy votes. Allison said it’s a guy’s year anyway. If the girls are getting picked off one by one, you could choreograph the best routine in the show’s history and it wouldn’t make a difference, right?”

Travis makes a noncommittal noise and starts to get up, but Ivan reaches out and grabs his wrist when he tries to get out of bed. “Where are you going?”

“To get a drink.” Travis slides his wrist out of Ivan’s hand until they’re palm to palm, fingers pressing together against the sheet. “You want anything?”

Ivan shakes his head and squeezes Travis’ fingers, then he lets go and lets Travis climb out of bed. He pushes himself up on one elbow to watch Travis pull a pair of sweats on, watches his muscles flex across his back and wonders if Ashley’s losing sleep over this or if it’s just Travis driving himself crazy.

He hears the fridge open, then the sound of Travis pouring a glass of water. Ivan gives him a few minutes to brood by himself, then he sighs and throws the covers back and doesn’t bother getting dressed before he heads for the kitchen.

When he gets there Travis is standing in front of the sink, staring out the little window at the parking lot across from their apartment building. He swallows a sigh and steps up behind Travis, resting his hands on Travis’ hips and pressing his lips to the top of Travis’ shoulder.

“Would you give yourself a break? They didn’t even say the routine was bad.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t what they hired me to do. They didn’t see anything new, that’s what they said. I mean, what are we even doing any of this for if I can’t deliver anything new?”

Travis lets out a sigh, and Ivan closes his eyes and presses his forehead against Travis’ shoulder for a minute, until he can answer without telling Travis to stop being such a drama queen.

“So it’s not going to win you an Emmy. It’s only the second week. Anyway, you’re not a contestant anymore, you don’t have to stay up all night sweating the results.”

Travis snorts a laugh and turns in Ivan’s grip until they’re face to face. “Tell that to Ashley.”

“It’s good for her. She might as well learn to sweat it out early on, right? I did, and look how far I got.”

When he grins Travis rolls his eyes, but he can’t quite stifle the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Come on,” Ivan says, pulling Travis toward the hall that leads back to the bedroom.

“I’m not really tired,” he says, but he’s not trying to pull away. “I was thinking about staying up awhile and working out some ideas for my next number.”

“You’ll be tired when I’m done with you. I’m planning to wear you out, babe.”

“Promises, promises.”

He grins when Travis laughs, then he pushes Travis onto the bed and gets to work on pulling his sweatpants back off. Travis lifts his hips and lets Ivan slide them down his thighs to hit the floor along with the clothes Ivan peeled off them when he got home.

“Don’t I always keep my promises?” Ivan asks, murmuring the words against Travis’ mouth.

“Yeah,” Travis answers. He’s got one hand on the back of Ivan’s neck, the other one open on Ivan’s back, fingers stretched wide and touching as much of his skin as Travis can reach. “Yeah, you do.”

It starts as a joke, just Ivan trying to get Travis to forget about the show for awhile. But something about the way Travis is looking at him makes Ivan’s heart beat too fast, and it’s stupid, because they’ve been together long enough for him to be used to Travis’ drama by now.

 _Four years._ It’s still hard to believe it’s been that long, sometimes, since that first moment on the show when Travis grinned and said, “Those are some moves, man,” and Ivan smiled like he just won the goddamn lottery. Like he’d won the whole fucking show already, just because Travis Wall smiled at him.

Since then he’s seen Travis smile a million times -- more, probably -- and it still makes Ivan’s pulse race a little every time he sees it. Maybe more these days, now that Travis’ career is starting to get serious and he spends more time stressed out and a lot less time smiling. So Ivan figures it’s his job to make sure Travis doesn’t spend all his time brooding about work or his mom or any of the other things he can’t control. Like wide-eyed kids he barely knows and sure as hell hasn’t let down, no matter what Nigel says.

And he’s had four years to learn the best ways to get Travis to stop brooding for awhile, so Ivan leans in for a kiss and rolls his hips against Travis’ until he’s groaning and flexing his fingers against Ivan’s back, then Ivan sets to work making good on his promise.

~

Ivan’s not in the audience on week four, either, and it’s not like they’ve got a DVR or anything, so he has to wait until somebody uploads Travis’ number on Youtube. Lucky for them the show has plenty of hardcore fans who _do_ have DVRs, and apparently don’t have any problem violating copyright. So he gets to see it the next morning, complete with Cat’s intro and the judges’ reactions.

“How come you didn’t lay a big kiss on me when we danced that routine?”

“It was improv, genius. We were just making it up as we went along, remember? Anyway, you were facing away from me when it ended, so that’s your bad.”

Travis is standing behind him, watching over his shoulder as Ivan watches the judges tell Kent and Lauren that they sold the love story Travis was going for. And it’s a much different routine than it was the first time he and Travis danced it, mostly because, yeah, they made up the whole thing as they went along, pretty much.

Ivan still thinks theirs was better; theirs was more raw and more emotional, and it did a better job of selling the fact that they keep coming back to each other, that they’ll always keep coming back. It was still a love story when they danced it, and maybe he’s just biased, but Ivan thinks they did a better job of selling it than Kent and Lauren.

He pauses the Youtube video and stands up, sliding his arms around Travis’ waist and pulling him close. “So can I have that kiss now?”

Travis rolls his eyes, but he grips Ivan’s hair and pulls him forward. He probably kisses better than Kent, too, Ivan thinks, laughing against Travis’ mouth because seriously, Kent can’t really believe he’s fooling anybody.

“What?” Travis asks, pulling back to look at him, but Ivan just grins and shakes his head.

“Nothing. I like our version better.”

“Me too,” Travis says, then he lets Ivan pull him forward and kiss him again.

~

Ivan _is_ in the audience on the night Allison and Robert dance to “Fix You”. The cameras never show him, though, and he’s grateful for that, because Denise has treated him like he’s one of her own since the first time Travis brought him home, so he’s not really holding it together.

After the show Travis finds him and pulls him backstage to hang out. They spend the first hour answering dumb questions, and Ivan hears himself saying over and over how awesome Denise is, how she’s always treated him like he’s one of her kids, pretty much from the first time Travis brought him home.

It’s true, and he figures it probably sounds like exactly what it is. Like he’s getting all choked up about his boyfriend’s mom because she made him feel accepted from day one in a way his own parents still haven’t managed.

Not that he and Travis are such a big secret anyway. They sucked at pretending they weren’t crazy about each other way back in season two, and there’s no reason to think they’re fooling anybody in season seven. Hell, they couldn’t even fool Travis’ mom, not that they exactly tried.

Ivan remembers the way Denise smiled at him when Travis brought him home the first time, as though she knew exactly what he was doing following her kid around the whole world, pretty much. Which she totally did, and for awhile Ivan figured she was some kind of, like, freaky mind-reader. Either that or he was completely obvious, which was probably closer to the truth, but it made him feel better to tell himself that Travis’ mom was psychic.

He remembers how nervous that smile made him on that first trip, jumpy and almost as clumsy as he was the first time he tried to pick up a ballroom routine, and finally Travis had to pull him aside and ask him what the hell his problem was.

“It’s your mom, dude,” he’d said. “I think she can totally tell.”

“Tell what?” Travis had asked, and Ivan’s pretty sure he rolled his eyes, because seriously.

“About _us_ , what else?”

“Oh,” Travis answered, then, “Well, yeah. I mean, she’s my mom. She can tell when I’m crazy about somebody.”

Travis had laughed at him a lot during that trip -- they all did, especially Danny, that bastard -- but it took awhile for Ivan to stop being jumpy anyway. It wasn’t his fault; he was used to his own parents, with their old world values and their frowning disapproval of his career. They wouldn’t have liked Travis anyway, but they really didn’t like the fact that in addition to fucking their son, Travis _danced_ with him.

Having Travis’ whole family take one look at them and know exactly how Travis felt about him...it was weird, was all. It took some getting used to, but through that whole visit Denise just kept smiling at him like he belonged right where he was, and eventually it started to feel like maybe she wasn’t wrong.

It made leaving Washington and moving to L.A. permanently a lot easier, anyway. There was a part of him that was sorry to leave his family behind, but the rest of him just wanted to be wherever Travis was. Knowing that at least Denise was in their corner even if the rest of the world wasn’t...well, it made those first few months when they didn’t really know what they were doing a little less scary.

It’s hard to believe while he’s standing in the green room during week five of season seven that all that happened almost four years ago. It’s hard to believe he and Travis made it this far, but here they are, and he’ll answer as many dumb questions as he has to if it means he gets to keep being Travis’ ‘plus one’ to...everything, pretty much.

The reporters get kind of sick of him after awhile and wander off to talk to the current contestants, and Ivan’s standing in the corner giving Travis the thousand-yard stare while he does his Stoic Face and lets Mia cry all over him about his routine. And it’s kind of funny, except he knows Travis is going to break down later tonight, and Ivan’s sure as hell not going to make it through that dry-eyed, so he knows they’re both in for an exhausting night and probably killer headaches in the morning.

An arm slips through his and he looks over to find Allison standing next to him. “Hey. You did pretty good out there tonight.”

“Thanks,” she says, tearing her gaze away from Travis to smile up at him. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” Ivan says, and he _sounds_ sure, at least, so that’s something. “I should probably rescue him from Mia at some point, though.”

Allison huffs out a little laugh that tells him she gets what he’s saying. “Good luck. You know they’re over there talking Emmy nominations.”

It doesn’t surprise him. Travis’ career has been heating up for awhile now; there were the Academy Awards and then his thing with Macy’s, and they’ve booked him for six separate episodes of the show this season. Ivan knows people think he should resent it, that some of the other dancers they hang out with probably wonder why it doesn’t bother him that he’s not in the limelight the way Travis is.

And it did bother him at first, at least a little. But in the end he’s a hip hop dancer, that’s what he loves and it’s what he’s best at. It’s a pretty limited market and everybody knows it, especially Ivan. So what if Travis is a better choreographer than him; Ivan gets to be there for all of it, and that’s all that matters.

As soon as he thinks it Travis looks up, searches him out in the crowd and gives him one of those half-smiles that tell Ivan exactly how hard he’s working to hold it together before he turns back to Mia. He leans in and says something, and she gives him a watery smile and a hug and Ivan sighs, because he knows Travis just fed her some line about needing a minute to pull it together or whatever, but it’s probably not all that far from the truth. But it doesn’t matter what he said to Mia, because a second later he’s crossing the room and grabbing Ivan’s hand, leaning across him to kiss Allison’s cheek before he straightens up and kisses Ivan right on the mouth.

“You ready to go home?” he says, already pulling Ivan toward the exit. And they both know what the answer is, so Ivan doesn’t mind that Travis doesn’t bother waiting for one.

~

“What do you think? Too gay?”

They’re alone in the studio, and Travis just spent the last twenty minutes walking Ivan through the steps of his final routine of the season. It’s Kent and Neil this time, which the producers like to play up like it’s this huge, risque deal that they let two guys dance together. Like they don’t do it every single year. Like guys don’t dance together all the goddamn time, whether it’s Ivan and his boys dancing hip hop or him and Travis improvising their way through a contemporary routine.

Either way, it’s not even a big deal, but they keep acting like it is, even seven seasons in, so Ivan gets the point Travis is trying to make.

“It’s pretty gay,” he says, though he’s not sure about the ‘too’ part.

It could go either way with Nigel, so it really depends on who else is judging. The producers will make Cat and Kent sell it as the end of a friendship or something, but whether or not the audience actually buys that...scratch that; there’s no way the audience is going to buy that, at least nobody who’s not a preteen Kent-obsessed girl. But Travis is grinning at him like he thinks the fact that it’s pretty gay is a plus, and there’s no way Ivan can _not_ grin back at him when Travis looks so _proud_ of himself.

“It might get you booted from next season, but at least you know Neil’s gonna kill it.”

Travis laughs at that, loud and kind of surprised, and when he kisses Ivan he can taste the salt from Travis’ sweat on his upper lip.

Depending on what mood Nigel and the rest of the producers are in, this number really might get Travis uninvited from season eight. Which is bullshit, considering the percentage of male dancers that are gay, including half the judges.

But the thing is, Travis is a household name now. That’s one thing the show did for him; it put him on people’s radar, first as a great dancer, then as a great choreographer. So even if he never does another season of the show, his career’s still taking off. Which means he can afford to take risks, and Ivan’s known him long enough to know that Travis’ risks usually pay off.

“It’s great, Trav,” Ivan says when Travis lets him up for air. He doesn’t let go, though, so Ivan wraps his arms around Travis’ waist and leads him in a little waltz around the room. “You’ll win an Emmy this year for sure.”

Travis shrugs like he actually thinks Ivan might believe that he doesn’t care about the recognition. They both know better, but Ivan doesn’t call him on it. The show gave Travis a shot at a successful career in dance, and that’s something that’s pretty hard to come by. But it gave Ivan this -- Travis laughing and twirling him around the studio floor, stopping at the top of a spin to pull him in for a slow, messy kiss -- and Ivan figures that all things considered, he won after all.


End file.
